First of all, I'm not a native speaker and my English looks a bit clumsy. I hope you forgive me that.

While playing the majority of vore games I discovered that there's something lacking there, and I wonder if you feel the same. Perhaps, it is a sort of...descriptiveness? I think this could be the right word.I believe, there are several components which make any 18+ role play game more curious and more interesting.

So, basically, I'm just wondering - what do you think the ideal text-based RP Vore Game should include? Why text-based? Since simple text is the most "honest" medium of all possible. You can show everything via text, it's simple and easy to use and produce. Of course, pictures and sprites are better, but I want to talk about the best game irregardless of the medium, so I decided to simplify the task a bit. It's always easy to generate text, you can generate a character almost randomly....while it's impossible to generate a picture yet.Also, I wanna discuss a non-MMO RP Game here. Just to make things easier. There's only one player who is to enjoy the game.

1. I prefer having a customized character. I want him or her having a name, the one which I like. I want it to look like something. Have some particular...features. Yes, I'd like to be unique and customized.

2. We talk about the ideal game, right? So, I think it would gonna have as many plot options as possible. Perhaps the best thing would be making some plot-generator, but then, plots might appear to be silly... Machines cannot create a work-of-art yet.

3. Probably the most curious component. The process of vore - how should it be made? What do you like in vore? Do you like anticipation? OH YES, you surely do! But then I always want it to come to an end, you want this to happen, and it happens. How descriptive should it look like for you? As descriptive as possible? Do you want to be able to struggle all the way down, and still have an option to escape? Then you die...but what about the afterlife? Do you like it to finish or would you prefer your RP to shift, to make you a part of the.....of the predator...A small chunk of its flesh, then watch the predator's life, or maybe you wanna become a ghost of a sort, a ghost which is attracted by things, a should which can be captivated when the new life is born - and being imprisoned into new body, flesh... Not necessary a human form, not necessary an animal even, maybe just a beautiful flower, if you like them.

Full-cycle - is not just prey->food->faeces. It's rather prey->food->imprisoned soul->free soul (optional)->forced (or partially forced) random reborn. So we can make it cyclical. So we can make it endless.What do you think about this notion? I can give you literary work which describe this sort of reborn, perhaps it could inspirate somebody.

And yes, I believe, I'd like to see an endless vore-RPG like that. Any objections?

Most of my RPs terminate in death since that's where my preferences usually tend to lie. But the cyclical model of the soul being reborn is interesting. If anyone out there is into the writing of Joseph Campbell then I'm sure you can appreciate the purpose of death and rebirth in a story cycle.

It's like this: I like a descriptive scene that leaves enough room for my brain to fill in the blanks the way I like them... but not too much leeway.

I also like when a scene is described through the eyes of either prey or pred... and more important, what they feel when it happens. A terrified prey can make up for many other faults a story can have. If it's a reaction that sounds plausible, the story will sound better.

As for the character: I think a character that is actually a character should be displayed in a game. If you give your readers (the readers of your game) a blank slate ready to be filled how they want, you can expect most people to be lazy. Do you watch TV shows even though you want the characters to be customizable?Nah. "Sit back, enjoy the show" is what works best. I'd much rather get to know a new character than get to know myself some more.

Think of Final Fantasy games. There are characters in there... and you only get to pick a name at best : PI'm going out on a limb here, but I'm pretty sure many people enjoyed quite a few parts of that.

Personally, I am a heavy rp'er. I used to run D&d games for a chat or two and even ran for a few OWoD chats. Lately, the scenes out there are dipping tremendously in quality in my opinion. As for rping here, I found a few people that I do enjoy playing with. Though I mostly do longer stories, involving an actual story for the characters to enjoy.

Lately, I have enjoyed a digimon Rp and a modern magic one. Both my characters in those rps have been custom made on the fly, but they all have a back story shortly after their conception.

Also the scenes I run are usually quite descriptive, trying to give the sense of an actual story... Like something you would read in a book or play script. I let the person I am playing with guide the scenes with little intervention on my part unless I have something planned with the story... Just how I am I guess.

When it comes to vore rps its rarely different, though I am not prone to doing one shots I can do them... I just prefer to have a character that is stable throughout the whole ride.

Ephriam wrote:Most of my RPs terminate in death since that's where my preferences usually tend to lie. But the cyclical model of the soul being reborn is interesting. If anyone out there is into the writing of Joseph Campbell then I'm sure you can appreciate the purpose of death and rebirth in a story cycle.

I haven't read Joseph Campbell himself but I have read some Irish myths which included some reborn cycles, when the was turned into a butterfly or fish, then drank or eaten by a woman and then reborn as her son or daughter. It seems to be a recurring motif there.

I found this on the wiki, is it what you meant? Actually I'm pretty fond of mythology so I will lead some of his works eventually, perhaps...

Beginning in the fertile grasslands of Europe in the Bronze Age and moving to the Levant and the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, the practice of agriculture spread along with a new way of understanding mankind's relationship to the world. At this time the earth was seen as the Mother, and the myths focused around Her life-giving powers. The plant and cultivation cycle was mirrored in religious rituals which often included human sacrifice, symbolic or literal.[30] The main figures of this system were a female Great Goddess, Mother Earth, and her ever-dying and ever-resurrected son/consort, a male God. At this time the focus was to participate in the repetitive rhythm the world moved in expressed as the four seasons, the birth and death of crops and the phases of the moon. At the center of this motion was the Mother Goddess from whom all life springs and to whom all life returns. This often gave Her a dual aspect as both mother and destroyer.

2Whatever666>If you give your readers (the readers of your game) a blank slate ready to be filled how they want, you can expect most people to be lazy.Well I thought about that. Perhaps it should make sense to customize the character if it makes any difference during the game, if it actually influences the RP. But anyway the background story is important for me. Very important. If there's no difference...then I would agree, perhaps.

2ShuckI'm not a paraRPer, just because I'm not a native speaker and my language is still...clumsy. Though I tend to para-RP when I RP in my native languge...I dont do that often though

Yes, I think it's important to take the point of view. Actually, that's what I try to do - I try to give secondary information, but not the actual information. I try to hint the player. I tell that the prey is breathing deeply. I tell them that it's covered with sweat and glances all around. I heard the notion that when you say the word "love" your love comes to an end. You know...

Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be; For the gentle wind does move Silently, invisibly.

Modern literature is all about hints...people enjoy doing some brainwork. If they can estimate the state of the character on their own, they will feel it "deeper". If you say them, "The prey is frightened" they will just think: "Huh? ok." But if they understand it on their own, they...they will actually feel it. Feel the terror. So, perhaps the secondary details are important here.

I dont know how to implement this idea to the video games. Just...make many many random vore scenes descriptions? Or still, make a text-generator which would evaluate the state of the character....But then, if this machine is too simple - nobody will trust it~ But if it's hard for a player to find out the information...if you give lots of details...some important...some not so important, which are just made to create a proper background ((but not totally fake and unnecessary details of course!))... Then, maybe, it would be more interesting for a player to play a game like that?

Huh, what sort of machine-generated information should the player receive to be devoured by vore RPG ? Dont you think I might be right here?

I'm actually a bit...dissatisfied with the length of some vore scenes in "modern" vore RPGs. I mean.... isn't it the most important part of the game after all? Shoouldnt you pay more attention? Shouldnt the player be given an illusion of struggling, of...battling your enemy. Modern games are good at making the player want to be devoured, but I think the typical vore scene looks silly mostly...

Part of the problem is that the human brain is built to find patterns, and the vore scene generator will be essentially one big pattern engine. It will take quite some work to develop a generator that will produce a scene that sounds fresh the second time. I think it would be absurdly difficult and subtle to develop one that could produce ten scenes. Consider how similar most human-written vore scenes are!

Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be; For the gentle wind does move Silently, invisibly.

Love is pretty hard to intellectualise, make vocal and still mean something; but my wife and I have managed it

More generally, the notion of "show, don't tell" in literature is a good one. Merely reading the emotional state of a character has little impact: you have to watch them sweat, or hear them moan. However, this is just a matter of good writing, independent of game-play.

Midir wrote:I'm actually a bit...dissatisfied with the length of some vore scenes in "modern" vore RPGs. I mean.... isn't it the most important part of the game after all? Shoouldnt you pay more attention? Shouldnt the player be given an illusion of struggling, of...battling your enemy. Modern games are good at making the player want to be devoured, but I think the typical vore scene looks silly mostly...

I have a similar problem in my stories. I can't write vore scenes of any length for toffee. Here, the issue is that the reader knows in advance what's going to happen. If there's no narrative tension then dwelling on the details, even sexy details, will eventually bore them. Because of this I have to fight the tendency to cut to black as soon as the vore is about to happen!

It sounds like you're proposing a system that gets around the problem of knowing the ending by making it uncertain. Maybe a minigame to avoid being eaten. Maybe a game about, once you have been eaten, making it as costly as possible for the pred. It might be worth looking at what Pyrrhic boardgames or cardgames are available and adapting the mechanism.

AndrewLondon wrote:It sounds like you're proposing a system that gets around the problem of knowing the ending by making it uncertain. Maybe a minigame to avoid being eaten. Maybe a game about, once you have been eaten, making it as costly as possible for the pred. It might be worth looking at what Pyrrhic boardgames or cardgames are available and adapting the mechanism.

Pyrrhic boardgames? Do you have something particular in mind?

Truly, I was thinking about the Dwarf Fortress when I wrote the previous post. There's not too much struggling in it but its fights are pretty....weirdly, almost absurdly random. There's also a mythology-generation system called "Legends", and I like this particular part as well. There's no vore in it (actually there's vore, but very subtle one) and it's not moddable enough to add appropriate vore scenes, but I like the very idea of making a universal game. It's Utopia, but still, I believe I could give it a try some day.

Ephriam wrote:Most of my RPs terminate in death since that's where my preferences usually tend to lie. But the cyclical model of the soul being reborn is interesting. If anyone out there is into the writing of Joseph Campbell then I'm sure you can appreciate the purpose of death and rebirth in a story cycle.

I haven't read Joseph Campbell himself but I have read some Irish myths which included some reborn cycles, when the was turned into a butterfly or fish, then drank or eaten by a woman and then reborn as her son or daughter. It seems to be a recurring motif there.

I found this on the wiki, is it what you meant? Actually I'm pretty fond of mythology so I will lead some of his works eventually, perhaps...

Yeah that wikipedia quote in your post sounds a lot like what Joseph Campbell is about. I think he started as an anthropologist. He studied mythology from cultures all around the world and spent the rest of his life crafting the idea of a "Monomyth" which presumably was the ancestral myth that all modern storytelling and religions came from. His seminal work was a book called the Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he described the Monomyth and related it to examples from a variety of cultures. The book got really popular in the 70's when a number of the "movie brats" (especially George Lucus, love him or hate him) rediscovered the book and incorporated it into a number of very successful franchises. It became such a ubiquitous part of cinema that by the 90's Disney was handing out guides condensed from Campbell's writings for all their writers to follow. It kind of got ridiculous and it slowly turned into a formula that produced as many bad movies as good. A lot of writers that I talk to either strongly love or hate the notion of the Campbellian Monomyth, but almost any writer working in the entertainment industry has at least heard of it. Like I really can't overstate what a profound effect it's had on the movies and TV shows we watch, for better or worse. Anyways, every couple months I return to the forums waving my arms and shouting about how the Hero with a Thousand Faces, the book that 90% of movies are based on in some way, has a whole chapter dedicated to vore. I think that you may be the first person to respond to my ravings. So thank you.

I heard about the Monomyth before, though in a bit different context. I think I'll buy the book, really. There's a couple of writers whom I wanna read badly, like, Fromm, for example, and I think I have just added Joseph Campbell to this list too.

As with most of my roleplaying I tend to be the narrator. So that's how most of mine go anyways... Too used to giving descriptions of the area and the people about. I like it when I can hear the people, cars and the regular noise going on. I like for my player to smell the scents, seen the sights and taste to people haha

Midir wrote:I heard about the Monomyth before, though in a bit different context. I think I'll buy the book, really. There's a couple of writers whom I wanna read badly, like, Fromm, for example, and I think I have just added Joseph Campbell to this list too.

I guess by extension all influential thinkers and writers are interesting, haha. My focus was on Joseph Campbell was because of his direct relevance to story as an artform, but you can learn storytelling, social, and cultural elements from any number of sources. There are endless forms of critical theory as applied to literature, texts, and film. Marxist, Psychoanalytical, Formalist, and (post)Structuralist theories seem to be the ones that get a lot of attention, but I'm really not well-read enough to discuss them at length. I'm tempted to group Hero with 1000 Faces with the screenwriting books by Syd Field, Christopher Volger, or Blake Snyder. They aren't books that will teach you about critical theory or human nature (although Campbell's book does cover a lot of human nature). The screenwriting books are more like guides on how to write for the market, and all of them build on or stem back to Campbell's book. Even if you don't intend on selling your writing (which sounds like a brutal process) those guides can be helpful for learning structure or giving a story a "cinematic" polish, and I feel the best place to start is with Campbell's original writing.

In my humble opinion, there are a few aspects to which an exceptional vore scene should have. It should be text heavy as a pictures is worth a thousand words and the more words; the more elaborate the fantasy. Having said that, describing every single aspect of her body in painstaking detail will actually bore the reader and take away from the experience, so while I place emphasis on elaborate and lengthy text in description of acts, I would suggest moderate to minimal description of the predator. Why? Because the human mind will see what it desires. Give me a basic description of an attractive woman, maybe an interesting feature or two, and I have a picture set in my mind. A little more detail is fine but any more than that and it becomes verbose.

An excellent vore scene should actually be mostly pre-vore taunting and preparation. If you are into the food-related subgenre, this is where it would be placed. The idea of vore is the sexual aspect, not the eventual death of it. After all, very few of us are likely to become attracted to that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which the Soldier's have their faces and blood melted off, despite that being virtually identical to what would occur during digestion. Having said that, the vore itself is quite important and the longer the process; the better. The tasting, the time in which the prey is in the mouth but not swallowed, being in the throat, descending down through the throat, and finally the stomach. The pain and hopelessness of digestion are powerful and deserving of a good degree of text and focus, but it is a fine line to walk as you should not delve into the bloody and melting in acids, your blood staining the yellowish liquid an orangey red, as most vore lovers (with a few hard vore enthusiasts as the exception) do not find that sexually appealing, but in fact could easily be turned off by such a description.

Most of those into vore that I have met or seen, myself included, place a heavy emphasis on the finality of vore. Death should inevitably be the end, for without death; much of the idea behind vore is lost. Vore is the ultimate form of Domination with being eaten: The ultimate form of submission. One form is dying so that another form may use the first as sustenance. Regardless of your opinion or desires; you will end up as nothing more than temporary fat on this girl stomach before being integrated into her body, your whole life gone and your only purpose to provide nutrients for your predator. That is the basis of vore. I imagine a few of you were turned on by nothing more than my two sentence description there.

So, should the character die? Of course; after a long exposition and taunting. That prey should have lost hope of freedom, escape, and life before they hit the tongue of their pred, even if they refused to admit it to themselves and continue to struggle in vain. In-stomach taunting and sensual feeling of her body while digestion is occurring is often a very nice touch.

In regards to your question of full cycle and the ideal game. There should never be a random plot generator. What you should do is create numerous archtypical plots, things that appeal to a particular nitch. Maybe have one plot center around giantess oral vore. Then one will be shrunken food-realted vore. One could be a shrunken AV, and another some sort of Angelic UB. Then allow your main characters to venture to these various areas and get lost in whichever plot they choose. You needn't thousands of random plots, but a few smart evolving plots.

As for full cycle; you could easily have something such as the soul leaving the body and passing on, perhaps attempting to inhabit another organism, starting over with some new body, or becoming victim to Soul Vore, and I'm sure people would be blown away by the ingenuity of your adventure.

However, go slowly and write what you secretly always wish a pred would do to you. In truth; if it arouses you, the odds are greatly in your favor that you will arouse your readers.